Once Upon A Time: Confessions of a Classic Gamer

By Andrew Godefroy

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and I had just sat down in the
living room with both coffee and laptop in hand, planning to start this
article when I stopped for a moment to consider what exactly I might write
about. Thinking about it, I cleared a space on the coffee table to rest my
feet on when it dawned on me that my article topic was right there in front
of me. Mixed together with the personal finance and coastal living
magazines was my copy of GURPS Traveller and a mint condition AD&D L1 The Secret of Bone Hill Module that I had just scored off of Ebay. Reaching
for my coffee and silently debating between rereading The Secret of Bone
Hill and starting the house cleaning, I realized one thing was for sure. I
was a classic gamer.

Like so many who have written this column before me, I too grasped
the chains of role-playing games in the early 1980s. My dad was (and still
is) an avid and very skilled model builder, so as a kid I spent plenty of
time in hobby shops and as you can imagine it didn't bother me one bit. I
remember I was on a family vacation in Florida in 1982 when after being on
good behavior the entire trip down I was rewarded with the Basic D&D boxed
set. I remember how fascinated I was by the B2 Module Keep on the Border
Lands, and never once questioned why six starving Orcs were hanging out in
one room just waiting to kill my character when they could have instead
gone next door where the giant spider was waiting and have eaten him. More
importantly perhaps, what the heck was a panther doing in a northern
European-like cave complex randomly wandering the corridors between Orcs
and giant spiders? Needless to say at age 11 random dungeon bashing was
anthropologically uncomplicated, glorious, and rewarding. A gamer was
born.

In high school I continued playing RPGs extensively. Having tried
and lost interest in Basic D&D, Indiana Jones, Star Frontiers, and Marvel
Super Heroes, I plunged into AD&D and Top Secret, the latter of which I
absolutely loved. I remember going on secret missions behind the wall in
East Germany, making contact with an agent in Yugoslavia, and stopping a
missile transport somewhere near Kiev. Finally in the late 1980s I
discovered Traveller, and being fascinated with space exploration and
science fiction, it became my game of choice throughout college. I ran an
incredibly successful Megatraveller campaign almost weekly for three years.
It even resulted in my first serious relationship with a girl, which
needless to say ended not long after the campaign was over.

Upon entering university in 1993 my RPGs went into long-term storage.
There were a lot of reasons for it, including the fact that my interests
had largely changed to girls and playing rugby, but also due to the fact
that at times it seemed that I was never going to repeat the success of my
Megatraveller campaign anyway, so why bother? My gaming group had split up
to go to various universities and a single visit to my own university
gaming club quickly convinced me not to return. I did dungeon master a 1st
Edition rules campaign for six or seven months but found that both the
genre and the players had changed. There was less emphasis on the nature
of the adventure, it seemed, and more on the persona of the character. Our
sessions started to resemble 'Dork Tower' cartoons, and while I was willing
to poke fun at my own hobby, I found others less so. The campaign ended
with the semester and we never returned to it. I thought afterwards that
perhaps I was past gaming altogether, and even sold a good portion of my
stuff to pay for schoolbooks. A gamer had died.

Perhaps it was for the better. In the mid-1990s a lot of things had turned
me away from RPGs in general. I was increasingly disappointed with the
products that were appearing, it seemed that every film or story was
getting turned into an RPG, which left one with the feeling that the
imagination so closely associated with role-playing was gone. Collectible
card games (CCGs) were also dominating the market and most of my friends
who were gamers were playing Magic, but I had no interest in it. I didn't
hate CCGs, but it just didn't have the feel or look of a role-playing
session. To me CCGs had no continuity or story. It wasn't like reading a
cool adventure that one of my friends had just written. It was just a pile
of cards with so-so artwork on them. I missed the story - the campaign. I
also missed the classic AD&D artwork - you know the stuff where dungeon
crawlers wore bell-bottoms. I was simply getting nostalgic about the
hobby.

I also realized that there was a small sociological rift in gaming and I
had fallen to one side of it. The people at the university gaming club
simply scared me. I was not into Live Action Role Playing (LARP) and had
not gone off the deep end into cyberpunk or vampire type gaming or
lifestyle. I also found adult RPGers increasingly annoying. I remember
the time when one of my roommates was complaining that the guy playing the
magic user in his Forgotten Realms campaign just wasn't performing up to
standard. "He refuses to execute the required words and hand gestures when
casting a spell", he said, "and I had to stop the game for an hour until he
agreed to do it." To this I replied, "Why did you do that? It's just a
game." He gave me this look like I had just driven a truck over his
favorite kitten. Twice. That's when I realized that I was a classic gamer
who increasingly didn't fit into modern gaming at all. In fact I barely
recognized it.

I looked elsewhere. A brief flirtation with Warhammer 40K resulted in
several well-painted miniatures and the conclusion that the game genre was
so impossible that I couldn't suspend my belief so far as to accept it. A
futuristic universe where they've mastered star travel but the best tank
developed closely resembles the speed, maneuverability, and firepower of a
First World War British Mark V? Right.

I probably would have abandoned RPGs all together if not for a friend I met
while completing graduate studies at another university a few years ago. A
little older than me, Rob also grew up on AD&D and had the same fascination
for 'the good old days' of gaming that I did. We commiserated about the
state of the hobby over beers and wings, and wondered aloud whether or not
we would ever get back into it at all. For one thing, I had all but done
away with my RPG material, save for a few treasured items that I just
couldn't part with. But conversations with Rob resulted in digging my RPG
material out of the old boxes and taking stock of what I had. A monster
manual, the introduction module from the Top Secret boxed set, the complete
set of AD&D modules for the Against the Giants and Vault of the Drow
campaign. And of course, some well used and loved Megatraveller source
books. Not pretty, but it was a start. I loved these games and had more
good memories of playing them than anything else I did as a kid. I wanted
back in.

So nearly ten years after I had put RPGs away, I returned to the hobby and
now find myself making regular trips back to the local gaming store.
Though the shelves are awash with D20 system rules and a plethora of
specialized genres and settings to satisfy almost any taste, I've
discovered that I don't feel as lost in the hobby as I did in the mid-
1990s. While I can't say for certain that I'll dive right into AD&D 3e, I
do appreciate the re-appearance of 'classic' style AD&D modules like those
put out by Goodman Games, and have noticed that in fact a lot of older
material is getting republished or updated. The entire classic Traveller
series is being reproduced (yahoo!) for example, and overall there seems to
be a small renaissance in the gaming industry, of a return to the
imagination that once drove the hobby from its niche into the mainstream.
My coffee table contents are a good example of that. While no big fan of
GURPS, I love what they have done with the Traveller series, and I've been
using Ebay and other Internet sites to slowly rebuild the collection of
classic AD&D modules I once owned and loved.

Essentially, I have become a classic gamer. I grew up on AD&D and
Traveller, played it, loved it, hated it, and abandoned it. I diversified,
only to discover that the best RPGs and games were at the root. I walked
away, and have now returned. I have less interest in acquiring hordes of
new gaming material, but instead have sought to revamp the collections I
once owned, and complete them. I've gotten nostalgic about the hobby, and
my friends and I have even decided that this summer over beers we're going
to have another go at role-playing, with me writing a classic campaign, no
less, while our wives shake their heads slightly at the 'boys' but think
it's cute. I wonder if I will still be playing in ten years, or will the
post-modern RPG industry push me out again? We'll have to wait and see.